Swilling beer, smoking dope and leering at porn, the other side of hate preacher 'Andy' Choudary

The British live 'like animals in a jungle' with their alcohol, gambling, prostitution and pornography.

That is the stated view of Anjem Choudary, the preacher of hate who this week insulted the families of dead soldiers and branded their marching comrades as cowards.

The extremist wants Britain to be brought under Sharia law, with women forced to wear burkas and put to death for adultery.

Yet before he grew his beard and turned to fundamentalism, Choudary, 41, was very much the life and soul of the party at Southampton University.

Big night out: The university law student Anjem Choudary's reading list extended to this soft-porn title

New identity: Choudary, centre, moved to radical Islam soon after qualifying as a solicitor

Photographs obtained by the Mail suggest 'Andy' - as he was then known - should be inflicting on himself the 40 lashes he prescribes for drunkenness.

As well as downing cider and lager, the cleric is shown playing drinking games with cards, clearly forbidden under his strict Islamic laws, and holding a cannabis joint between his lips before smoking it.

And the woman on the cover of the Mayfair pornographic magazine he is looking at is certainly not wearing a burka.

On the evidence of friends from his student days, Choudary had sex with numerous white Christian girls.

Under his version of Sharia law, he should be stoned to death for sex outside marriage.

High time: Choudary with a beer and joint, and right, swigging a cider in one go

One former friend said: 'I can't keep a straight face when I see "fundamentalist Muslim Anjem Choudary" in the papers attacking the British for drinking or having girlfriends.

'When I knew him, he liked to be called Andy, would often smoke cannabis spliffs all day, and was proud of his ability to down a pint of cider in a couple of seconds.

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'And he was ruthless with girls. When he briefly worked as an English teacher for foreign students in London, he'd pull one of them every few days, sleep with her, then move on to another.

'If Sharia law was introduced, he would have been whipped and stoned to death many times over.'

Choudary, who was born in South-East London to a market stall-holder of Pakistani descent, has become one of the faces of extremist Islam.

But in his days as a law student, he experimented with LSD, hallucinating and laughing hysterically for more than 20 hours.

After he qualified as a solicitor, however, he swiftly moved into ever more radical Islam.

Former acquaintances said this was possibly because he was angered by his failure to land a well-paid job with a big City law firm.

At a mosque in Woolwich he met notorious firebrand preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed and quickly became his right-hand man.

He also mixed with hook-handed demagogue Abu Hamza, who once called for bomb attacks on British civilian aircraft at a meeting chaired by Choudary.

Choudary, meanwhile, is an ever-more prominent spokesman for radical Islam in Britain - despite the fact that the two groups he ran with Bakri, Al Muhajiroun and Al-Ghurabaa, have been banned.

So he was quick this week to support the radicals who protested against Royal Anglian Regiment soldiers marching in Luton on their return from Iraq.

Outrageously, he called them 'cowards who cannot fight, as their uncanny knack for death by friendly fire illustrates'.

Yesterday, the father-of-three, who lives in East London on benefits from the state he so condemns, returned to the attack.

When it was suggested he was the most reviled man in Britain, he said: 'That's a badge I would wear with pride.'

He added that 'through jihad' - which he insists would be jihad of the word, rather than the sword - he sought 'a pure Islamic state with Sharia law in Britain'.

'Every woman, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, would have to wear a traditional burka,' he said. 'Anyone who becomes intoxicated by alcohol would be given 40 lashes in public, and people who commit adultery would be stoned to death.'

When confronted about his dubious past, Choudary, who is separated from his wife, denied it.

Last night, Bakri, speaking from Lebanon where he fled to four years ago, said: 'I don't believe the rumours against my good friend Mr Choudary are really true.'

Supported by Choudary, the Muslim protesters who demonstrated against the Royal Anglian Regiment on Tuesday defiantly returned to the streets of Luton yesterday, handing out leaflets criticising the 'racist British public'.

Britain's former most senior Muslim police officer, Tarique Ghaffur, called for the demonstrators to be brought to justice.

Tariq Mahmood, of the Islamic Cultural Society, based at Luton's Central Mosque, said the protesters were notorious for causing trouble.

'This small group of people is not representative of the Muslim community,' he said.